In 2009 ARM showed off prototype netbooks "capable of driving HD content, can surf the web for 8 hours, and will cost round and about 250 USD". Yet still, none have made it to the market. Why do you think this is so? Because ARM signed a deal with Adobe in 2008 to bring Flash and AIR to the ARM architecture, a promise they will finally deliver later this year. And you wonder why Apple won't have Flash on the iPhone when it can hold back an entire product category for two years.

There was immediate discussion of how we would love to see RISC OS, or even Haiku on such a machine.

I just wanted to make 100% clear that not all of old Acorn users are deluded that is a good idea. Waste of time. Might be interested in vitualizing a RiscPC on it, but not the insanity of RiscOS being the machine OS.

Heh, I was reading the linked articles not the OS News one. Ah well...

Regarding RiscOS on these things, I can see it being a hobby project but nothing more without a really serious update to the underpinnings of the OS, which I'm sure would be more time+effort than using Linux.

There's also a niche market of elderly people that don't know anything other than RISC OS, and are using either circa-1997 233 MHz StrongARM RiscPCs, circa-2000 233 or 300 MHz Kinetic (RAM local to the CPU card) StrongARM RiscPCs, circa-2002 600 MHz XScale-based Iyonixes, and circa-2004 400 MHz ARM9-based A9homes with a beta OS.

Those users, that's all they know how to use, and that's all they'll use until they die. They'll buy new hardware if it's cheap enough, but only if it can run RISC OS. For that matter, a couple companies have sold x86 PCs running Virtual RiscPC, which... isn't very good, and has nasty, buggy DRM.